Levels of Understanding

While teaching undergraduates a primary text in conjunction with a critical article, I have a ladder of different levels of goals I would like to achieve:

• Understand the primary text.  (An obvious point, but one that takes up a not insignificant amount of time in Middle English courses, where the language itself is a barrier.)
• Understand the article.
• Find a way to put the ideas of the article in conversation with the primary text.
• Decide if you agree or disagree with the article.  (I think most of us, at times, find ourselves very accepting of things published in official academic journals.)

To teach students a way of doing the third point, I might put Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended” into conversation with George Eliot’s Silas Marner.  Armstrong very helpfully focuses on Victorian novels, and both she and Silas Marner are interested in gender roles.

Since the article is lengthy, I would encourage the students to find one point from it that could apply to, or could be in opposition, to Silas Marner.  (Basically like the assignment for these blog posts!)

We might start out by looking at this passage from Armstrong:

“We must conclude that being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing…Brontë’s novel, in other words, imagines life outside the gender binary—which includes the lion’s share of its characters—as a state of being that nullifies kinship along with erotic object choice by immersing the individual in a biological milieu that barely distinguishes life from Death” (544).

The base questions are then: Does this seem true of how gender operates in Silas Marner?  Why or why not?  What passages from Silas Marner support your answer?

My own answer, in a nutshell, would be that gender does not operate the same way in Silas Marner, that in the character of Silas himself both what would be considered masculine and feminine traits are eventually combined—and that the combination is what actually helps reintegrate him into society.

At the beginning of the novel, Silas lives alone, tending to his weaving and avoiding interaction with the Raveloe society whenever possible.  When he goes to the local tavern to report the theft of his gold, he is literally taken for a ghost:

“Yet the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had a more condescending disposition than Mr. Macey attributed to them; for the pale, thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light, uttering no word, but looking round at the company with his strange, unearthly eyes.  The long pipes gave a simultaneous movement, like the antennae of started insects, and every man present, not excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not Silas Marner in the flesh, but an apparition” (53).

At this point in the story, Silas is an oddity, a caricature of a man, but certainly not an individual.

After Silas adopts the abandoned Eppie, however, his life and the society’s perception of him begin to change.  Yes, Silas finally has a daughter/household to “support his masculinity” (Armstrong 544), but he really takes on the role of both father and mother as he raises Eppie, refusing the help of anyone else.  As the years progress and Silas becomes older, he actually becomes dependent on Eppie.  The teenaged Eppie herself imagines “a little home where he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him” (174-175).

During this time, however, Silas is integrated into the society he had been rejecting.  He stops immersing himself solely in his work.  He begins going to church.  He makes friends with his neighbors.  As Silas “softens,” or becomes more “feminine” through socializing and gossiping and completing household chores, he becomes more of an individual to both the other characters and to the readers.  The denizens of the local tavern conclude, “that he had brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to a lone, motherless child” and “that when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of neighbors to wish him joy” (183).

By comparing these passages and plot events from Silas Marner with Armstrong’s argument, we can see that gender is not a clear-cut binary for Marner himself—and that turns out to be a benefit for him.  His place as mother father and mother actually brings him kinship, identity, an renewed life.

A further class discussion might focus on a comparison of Silas with the other male protagonist, Godfrey Cass, to determine whether they exhibit different types of masculinity and what the implications of that are.  We also could determine whether any characters are actually within the gender binary that Armstrong discusses and whether they have particularly fixed identities.

Admittedly this discussion is still somewhat superficial (How is each character portrayed?  Does that fit with or oppose Armstrong’s argument?), but hopefully the comparison of character gender portrayals and the overarching conclusions would inspire some students to think about the topic more closely and perhaps use it as a jumping-off place for a paper topic.